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Old July 3, 2015   #27
FLRedHeart
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Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: FL 8b/9a
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Originally Posted by carolyn137 View Post
I don't know either of you that well, and whether you know I have to use a walker since back in Dec of 2004 I fell and severed all four quads in my right leg/ And I was getting more and more frustrated that I couldn 't fetch my Livingston book nor my Michigan Bulletin of 1939 ASAP.

So I just e-mailed Mike, gave him the link to this thread and asked if he would review it, noted my concerns to him, and asked when and if he had time he could stop by and share with us his impressions and conclusions. Carolyn
Carolyn, Despite all your difficulties, you have a wonderfully young mind and heart. It is a hard balancing act to keep the frustration in check.

I feel I know you after reading your interesting posts throughout the years. I've mentioned to you abruptly changing my life too, to become a caregiver for my Dear Mother.

She was locked in her body on a bed, completely immobile and unable to communicate, eat, or any other bodily function except breathe and see. According to her good doctors I would let them give her morphine and stop food, without considering or assessing her mental awareness or will to continue, which was passionate and obvious.

I researched and developed, as her body shut down before her mind was ready, solutions to all of these which gave her 5 comfortable years after that, in her own home watching the nature out the picture windows she so loved.

I can say honestly I had two bodies during the last 5 years of 24/7 intensive care and I didn't even know what I looked like by the time it was over. That's my story. I used gardening to heal.

**** ****

Regarding reviving the variety Acme, Victory Seeds, etc., I hope the person behind Victory can give us his thoughts. In a practical sense I would like to have a representative of Acme to grow. If no one can find one, I think the best bet is to take Livingston's Beauty and select for size and color. I probably will do this myself after getting interested through this thread. So I hope Mr. Dunton says what he thinks about that approach as it might save me some grief if I'm misguided, but these two tomatoes were apparently quite similar excepting a generally larger Beauty and slightly different tone to a critical eye.

My other thought is to start from Perfection. Perfection is available and could be simply that red version of Acme, selected from the field Acme was growing in 5 years after the introduction of Acme. Unfortunately the historical record doesn't seem to contain whether this was simply a skin mutation, or something else from that field. Perhaps I've missed something. But re-constituting program # 2 would be to cross Perfection (1880) with Livingston's Beauty (1886), select F2 if appropriate for true Acme type color as best as the descriptions allow, which I'm assuming is pink, back cross into Perfection a couple more times repeating the selection of progeny for color, size (with attention to firmness and not seediness), seeds each time and then just carry that selection forward, hoping it would be stable before long. The size would target a 6 oz. fruit unless there is an actual weight description elsewhere, at least in my interpretation.

I would be very proud to call that a resurrected (Livingston's) Acme if the inputs were true. I notice Victory has both of the mentioned Livingston varieties so that's good news because the site is refreshingly precise about where assumptions and what it offers. The genetics of Livingston's Beauty, as well as (Livingston's) Acme (1875), which may or may not be related to Paragon (seemingly a good bet to be a parent of Acme) since when they were developed they seem to be his best smooth releases when the field was small and he was the leader.

From my understanding, the biggest assumption with this approach deals with how many independent lines Livingston maintained in the early years. It sounds like he was more of a patient type, sticking to his best material and making huge grow-outs and studying them for both mutation and using selection pressure more than a shotgun approach of breeding lines. The information we have usually discusses selecting a plant from an earlier variety. It would be more efficient, since he had production commitments with his existing varieties.

Hope someone gives their thoughts on these approaches or perhaps has a better idea.

Cheers

Last edited by FLRedHeart; July 3, 2015 at 01:39 AM.
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